Computer systems incorporating multimedia functions are increasingly being designed with user-friendliness in mind, as they move into the consumer product market. For this reason, remote controls have become essential, or at least highly desirable, in various computer systems. It would be desirable for a key on a remote control to be able to simulate a keyboard key, so that the remote control could be used in conjunction with existing applications expecting keyboard input. However, it would not be practical to have a one-to-one mapping from each key on a computer keyboard to corresponding keys on a remote control, given that there are usually more than 100 keys on a keyboard and a remote control is designed to be handheld and, thus, can only have a limited number of keys. On the other hand, because of the desirability of using a remote control with a variety of existing applications requiring different keyboard input, a fixed mapping between keys on the remote control and keyboard keys would not be particularly useful. What is needed is a technique that allows a user to redefine the keyboard keys to be simulated by the keys on the remote control, according to the keyboard input expected by the intended application. Such a technique would, for example, be particularly useful in game playing since different games require different keyboard input (e.g., the arrow keys, the space key, the enter key).